When developing websites and applications with JavaScript we often write console.log() messages between our lines of code.

Things can get a little bit annoying when your console starts to fill up with a lot of these messages and you might feel like you want to focus just on a certain part of the program.

I have wished many times that there would be an easy way to temporarily turn off messages that I don’t need, but commenting them out one by one feels a little bit too tedious. That’s why I decided to develop a custom console log function that will only log I messages that have the highest priority number that way I can basically shut off all other messages by giving one of my messages up higher priority value. This lets me really focus on the message that I need to focus on . So here is a custom myLog() function that I’m now calling instead of console log and it takes two arguments:

the thing to log

and a priority number

If I set the priority number of one of my calls to be high higher than the others then only that message will be shown. So for example if other priorities are number one but I do a new console log that has a priority of two, then only that log message with the highest priority will be shown .

let priority = 0;
let lastLog;

function myLog(message, logPriority) {
    if (logPriority >= priority) {
        lastLog = message;
        priority = logPriority;
    }
    console.log(lastLog);
}
//use like this
myLog(`my log message and variable ${myvar}`, 1)

One downside with this method is that unlike regular console logs it doesn’t automatically show you the file and line of code that produced the console log. We can remedy this by writing a little helper function that will use the error logging capabilities in order to also include the file and the line information together with the console log. The fileInfo is now an optional third argument that you can use:

let priority = 0;
let lastLog;

function myLog(message, logPriority, fileInfo) {
    if (logPriority >= priority) {
        lastLog = message;
        priority = logPriority;
    }
    console.log(lastLog);

    if (fileInfo){ //check that it's not undefined
        console.log(`Current file: ${fileInfo.filename}, line number: ${fileInfo.lineNumber}`);

    }

}

//for getting line number and file name


function getFileInfo() {
    const err = new Error();
    const stackTrace = err.stack.split('\n')[2].trim();
    const matchResult = /\((.*):(\d+):\d+\)/.exec(stackTrace);
    const absoluteFilename = matchResult[1];
    const lineNumber = matchResult[2];

    const currentDir = window.location.href.split('/').slice(0, -1).join('/');
    const relativeFilename = absoluteFilename.replace(currentDir, '');

    return {
        filename: relativeFilename,
        lineNumber: lineNumber
    };
}

//use like this:
    myLog(`dialogueIDSent: ${dialogueIDSent}`, 1, fileInfo = getFileInfo());

 Have you ever needed to force refresh a website with the Brave browser on a mobile device like iPhone or Android phone?

The need to do that may arise, for example, when developing websites for WordPress, because WordPress will attempt to cache the CSS files and your latest changes might not be reflected even if you reload the page.

Many websites advice you to go to the browser cache settings and clear the entire cache. But that is an overkill -there is a better and simpler way:

The easiest way to force Brave to force refresh on your mobile device is to switch the browser to desktop mode from the menu with the three dots. The feature is called “Request desktop site”. After switching to that, you can then switch back to a regular mobile page and the cache should be updated.

It’s as simple as that!